Hi Kirill, On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 11:41:50AM +0000, Rybalchenko, Kirill wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > The reason this feature is needed is to be able to program custom flow types > using a template packet rather than building up a C struct to define the > protocol. This means that users don't have to work on the DPDK internals to > support new flow types that they may be using, but can instead add them > dynamically as part of their application. There are also several customers > who are looking for this feature as part of the 17.11 LTS release. > > This patchset has been out since August and these comments are very late, > with the first objections last week, which we tried to answer. This short > notice doesn't allow us a reasonable amount of time to take them into account. > > However, to address your primary concern, we can implement this using a i40e > private API, so that we are not tying users to FDIR APIs and thus not > blocking the removal of the APIs in time. > > Ideally we would like to use rte_flow but it is based around the idea of > describing packet headers which is significantly different from the proposed > method using template packets. Longer term it may be possible to support this > in rte_flow, we could propose this for discussion in the next release, and if > there is community interest/agreement we can add it. > > We will rework this, in the short term, as a private API, as suggested above, > and then propose an rte_flow API in the longer term. Let us know if you have > any concerns about this.
I am not trying to push for its integration through rte_flow at this stage and I don't mind the chosen PMD-specific approach, I'm just curious about the reasons that made it hard to implement as a RTE_FLOW_ITEM_RAW thing? (e.g. a rule with a pattern that only contains one or several such items) Please have a look at the rte_flow_item_raw structure in rte_flow.h, tell me what's missing in there and I'll take it into account during the next overhaul. Thanks in advance for your feedback. -- Adrien Mazarguil 6WIND
